


Thin

by MithrilWren



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Dysphoria, Body Image, Character Study, Disordered Eating, Gen, Self-Esteem Issues, Weight Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-24 00:09:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20017042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MithrilWren/pseuds/MithrilWren
Summary: Nott wakes up in a body that she doesn't recognize, but the way she feels is all too familiar.





	Thin

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boy are y'all ready for some _projection_?

You wake up one day in a body that is not your own.

It’s _your_ body, maybe, but there’s nothing in it that you recognize. The skin (ugly), the hair (ugly), the teeth and the joints and the eyes and the way your knees bend inwards-

You wake up in a body that is not your own, but the awful way you feel is all too familiar.

You used to stare into mirrors so often when you were younger, pressing your too-short nails into the space beneath your arms and grasping the flesh that protruded from the band of your cotton dress, lifting your hand to your chin and pulling at the loose skin beneath your jaw, measuring between fingers the parts of you that never seem to shrink no matter how fast you ran. And the boys of the village gave you plenty of reasons to run.

Then you met Yeza, and you stopped looking into mirrors at all. Your husband told you that you were pretty, and you wanted so desperately to believe him. You didn’t give yourself the opportunity to prove his words wrong.

Now, you find mirrors wherever you go. In the shine of polished silver and wet stone, you catch glimpses of this body, not your own body, and there’s a beat where the reflected girl might be the one you wanted to see, all those years ago. Her black cloak can’t cover up how close the rags cling to her tiny frame. It fascinates you as much as it horrifies, to see how her eyes have sunken into her skull. She is made of skin and bones and little else, and she is exactly the shape you had always wanted to be, if that shape wasn’t also a monster.

This body is not your own, and you hate it, but you hated the one that came before it too.

\---

The first time Caleb carries you, the first time you _let_ him carry you, he finds you hunched against a riverbank, hissing at the twisted mess that your ankle’s become. You cannot walk, you cannot run, you cannot move fast enough through the snow to ferry you someplace warm for the night. He sees this and doesn’t mock you for it. He picks you up before you can protest, and there is a moment, as his arms wrap around your middle that you think you might cry, because he is going to lift with all his might and you will remain exactly where you are.

Then you’re hoisted into the air, and you don’t cry in the end, but you’re shaking. He can feel it, and his hands tighten around your forearms. “I can walk,” you whine through ice-shard teeth, and he pulls you in closer to his chest. “Put me down, Caleb. I’m too heavy to carry all the way.”

“Nonsense,” he mumbles between chattering teeth of his own. “You are light as a feather.”

You have never heard sweeter, kinder words, and they make you so _angry_ but you can’t take it out on Caleb. He’s trying his best. Like always, you’re the one who’s wrong.

You know, in theory, that Caleb is too thin for his frame. That you are too. That the two of you haven’t eaten more than roots in days. He doesn’t wear it well, the starvation.

You can’t help but wonder, do you?

\---

There was a game you played, when you were lying in bed in your mother’s house and all your brothers were finally asleep. You’d take your middle finger and your thumb and press them around your wrist until the tips met. Release, and try again, feeling the way up your arm until the two couldn’t reach. That last white imprint of two thick fingers was the measuring point. Two inches from your wrist and you were just big-boned. One inch and you were average. Around the wrist, and all of this was excuses, and your mother lied to you, and-

You hate people touching you.

It’s not your body, but it’s not theirs either, and nobody should be allowed to touch it but you. Still, one day Beau grabs you and pulls you out of the line of fire and her deft fingers wrap around your arm and not only do the tips of her fingers meet, but her thumb reaches all the way to her knuckles, and further on beyond that. You don’t ask her to hold on, but you do think about it, late at night, tracing the sharp point of your elbow with sharper nails, and fixated on how strange it all feels. On how much has changed.

Sleep comes hard at the best of times. It’s harder still for knowing what dangers are waiting in the darkness, for not knowing what creature you might wake up and spy in the mirror, and whether there will be more monsters than you staring back. You lie awake with your hands wrapped around your middle, pressing into the divots of your pelvis and finding all the places you used to pull, only there’s no flesh to grab onto anymore. When you run your hands over your stomach, all you can feel is tight skin and the flat, curveless plane of your hips.

If it weren’t for the press of jagged teeth against your gums, you could pretend this was your body. The one you wanted, before. The one you knew you could never have, no matter how much you ran, or how fast, or how far. But you can’t pretend.

This body is not yours, and it never will be.

\---

Around the corner from Jester’s house is a café. They serve pastries and scones and fresh jam on bread to girls with white parasols and ribbons in their hair, and you slip out to visit when nobody’s paying attention.

There are mirrors everywhere in the Chateau: long ones for dressing and vanities for makeup and basins of washing water and polished windows. You choose one close to the door and far from prying eyes before casting the spell.

The person looking back isn’t Nott, but it isn’t Veth either. It’s got the colours of Veth but the shape of Nott. All hard angles and paper skin, button necklace hung against razor-sharp bones where there used to be soft curves, and it wasn’t a conscious choice you made, but maybe it was, because if you could choose to be thin, why wouldn’t you?

You don’t see Veth in the mirror, not really. That’s probably for the best. There are things about her that you don’t miss at all.

You go out to the café. The waiter smiles at you as he places a little cup of tea on your table, and you are pretty, and you are acceptable, and you are worth looking at like this, _if_ you look like this-

And even this illusion – this is not your body.

And nothing feels quite right.

\---

Fjord makes a joke. He doesn’t mean it. He doesn’t mean anything he says, and it sometimes seems like you’re the only one who notices. _Might want to lay off the sea capers, you’re looking a little weighed down, Nott._

It’s a joke. You know it’s a joke. You aren’t blind. You aren’t as frail, as half-starved as you were when you all met in Trostenwald but when you draw your knees together your thighs don’t touch. Nobody could tell you that this body is fat. It simply isn’t true.

But you still remember the teasing. Still remember how to treat the comments as a reminder, as motivation. Still remember how to skip meals.

You scarf down your own dinner portion, then steal some of Fjord’s too, because _fuck him_. You go to bed with a heavy stomach, filled past the point of comfort, and when you place your hand on your belly there’s a bulge there, and that part of you almost feels soft.

That part of you almost feels familiar.

You hate it.

You do.

You should.

You don’t-

You don’t know when you grew to hate the bones more.

\---

It was always your greatest wish, to disappear, but it was so hard to do. You were conspicuous – big and gawky and loud and even running as fast as you could, far too slow to escape the boys and their taunts.

Now you are in a group and you are _fast_ , faster than any halfling you’ve met. This body knows how to move, to dodge, and at last, how to disappear altogether. All it takes is a bit of tree gum and this body becomes nothing.

You become nothing.

No attention, no staring, no comments. Complete freedom. If nobody can see you, does it matter what you look like?

If nobody sees you, do you exist at all?

This is where you start to see the difference.

You had thought that being invisible would make you feel better about yourself, but you are still aware of every part of you that’s wrong. You can escape others’ eyes, but you can’t escape the way you feel. You can’t escape this body, this body that is not yours. You still know who you are.

You had thought, once upon a time, that if you were only smaller, then everything would go easier for you. But invisible, you are the smallest you can be, and you still hate yourself. At night, under the cover of darkness and thick blankets, your knees knock together like sticks rubbing for warmth and it’s as uncomfortable as the chafing between your thighs once was.

You don’t know anymore, how you’re supposed to feel about all of this. You just don’t know.

\---

A universal fact: the most delicate things in the world are also the most beautiful. Glass beads, crystal shards, yellow flowers all found their way into your drawer, and you treasured them more than anything. You think maybe that’s why you added Caleb to your collection, all those years ago.

His body is not made for weathering blows. It’s made for days spent in dim libraries and solemn contemplation, and the whole world can see how beautiful his fragility is, or rather they would see, if he didn’t work so hard to disguise it.

This body, you discover, is not fragile at all. It is very capable of taking a hit.

You would have not been caught dead rolling around in the dust when you were younger, at least not by choice. ‘Dirty’ was not another adjective you needed flung in your direction, when ‘beautiful’ was all you wanted to hear. You had to be more like those delicate girls, with their wispy frames and hair braided just so. The boys collected them, one by one, and you were always left to your own devices, wondering when you would be worthy of being placed on a shelf and admired.

Now you fall to the ground without thought when it suits you, when you’re artfully dodging a heavy fist, when it provides the better angle for the shot. There’s something freeing in it, to be allowed to be rough. There are so many more things you can do when the heat of battle eclipses the compulsive need to be seen in a flattering light.

Then one day, you find yourself face to face with a dragon, and Jester bleeding out across the room, and a choice that isn’t one at all. You can’t let her die.

You take the blow that would have shattered more delicate bones, and you are still standing, and in that moment, you are so grateful to this body for keeping the two of you alive. In that moment, you are glad not to be beautiful, because instead you are hardy _._ Instead, you are _tough._ You find that you’re proud of that. It’s a feature of this body, true, but it’s also a part of _you_ , and it’s one of the few that you really love about yourself.

Caleb scoops you up after the battle is won and carries you off to bed, and it doesn’t even occur to you to protest. His touch is familiar, and welcome, and you are both so much stronger than you were before.

\---

In Xhorhas, you find others with bodies like this one. Goblins who are tall and squat, with fat arms and no arms, snaggle-toothed and surprisingly clean. There are shopkeepers and workmasters and mothers ferrying their children through the crowded streets. Some of them you hate on sight. Some of them, despite your better judgement, you can’t help but see as people. Some, you almost like.

It grows harder to remember that this body makes you a monster, when you are surrounded every day by monsters, and those monsters have families and paint pictures and on one memorable occasion, stop the whole party in the middle of the street to feed Frumpkin with an open palm and a soft, almost awed smile.

The Xhorhasians you meet… their bodies make them monsters, but before that they are themselves. Just _people_ , good and bad and everything in between.

It’s hard to hate them, just for that.

\---

You find Yeza again. He is thin and frail and covered in dirt and ugly in none of the ways that matter. He still has the kindest eyes you’ve ever seen.

It’s hard, but over the course of weeks, you learn to trust his words again. You find you can look in mirrors now, even when you’re with him, because-

He still wants to hold you, even in this body.

He still calls you pretty, even in this body.

He still loves you, even in this body.

Because it’s still you.

\---

It’s still you.

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, I don't get the impression that the thing canon-Veth felt insecure about was primarily her weight, but I'm very grateful for an opportunity to dig in the incredibly specific experience of rapid weight loss and how it doesn't magically solve all your self-esteem issues (who knew?)


End file.
